Progress report! I reworked the model for the bow, fixing mirroring issues, changing a lot of triangles back into quads, and making the form more full.

Then I went into organizing a color set to work from. The yellow turned out to be really ugly in-game.

Then worked on getting the proper UVs set up, with mirroring and all. The UVs for the bow are my best yet!

I tried sculpting to get high detail but it just hasn't been working. Level 5 detail in Blender didn't provide enough resolution for me to work with, so I brought it up a notch to level 6. The sculpting tools just feel too foreign to me, like trying to hold a pencil with my toes. I will give ZBrush a chance, perhaps next month.

I'm excited! At the moment, not sure whether I should continue to work in Maya, or pick up Blender. After a bit of toying around with the mesh I created, I was able to export it from Maya and into Blender, and then into Dota 2. I definitely have a slightly better understanding of the workflow now ;D

Here's my progress so far on the modelling.

maya:

blender:

And this is the preview in the game, loaded with the original WR models.